“How very rude to be speaking Welsh.”
That was the complaint a stranger directed at Patsy, a Welsh learner featured in my latest book, after overhearing her family speaking Welsh in a Cardiff cafe. She could hardly believe it: “But you’re in Wales. What are you talking about?”
Wales has come a long way since the days of the Welsh not, a wooden token often accompanied by corporal punishment that was used in some 19th-century schools to discourage children from speaking Welsh. The Welsh language is now more visible, more widely supported and more politically protected than at any point in history.
But my ongoing research of Welsh-speaking families living in Cardiff suggests that while attitudes have improved dramatically, some linguistic prejudice still lingers beneath the surface. The pattern is not unique to Wales. I found similar experiences among Finland’s Swedish-speaking minority, where official recognition of the language has not always translated into acceptance in everyday life.
Several of the Welsh-speaking parents I interviewed had experienced negative attitudes towards Welsh when they were growing up in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. One father remembered being verbally abused for speaking Welsh in Cardiff as a child. Yet he was clear that things had changed.
Other participants described being stereotyped or made to feel uncomfortable because they spoke Welsh. They felt that such prejudice was less obvious today, but could still appear in subtle ways, sometimes disguised as humour.
One Welsh-speaking teacher described becoming more aware of negative attitudes towards Welsh after moving from a Welsh-medium school to an English-medium one. The difference between generations was notable. Parents in my study could recall experiences of stereotyping, discrimination or prejudice. Their children had experienced very little of this.
Younger participants had also grown up in an environment where Welsh was more visible and where there were more opportunities to use it outside the home. This meant that speaking Welsh could feel like an ordinary part of everyday life rather than something that marked them out.
A comparison with Finland
The experiences of the Welsh speakers became even more interesting when I compared them with those of Swedish speakers in Finland. Swedish was once the language of Finland’s political, economic and cultural elite. It remains one of the country’s two national languages alongside Finnish but is now spoken as a first language by only around 5% of the population. Like Welsh in Wales, it has a long history and a recognised place in public life. But speakers can still encounter negative attitudes.
One Swedish-speaking Finnish father told me that colleagues had expressed prejudice against Swedish speakers during lunch, unaware that he himself was one. He was particularly taken aback by their remarks, as he had regarded his new colleagues as educated and worldly.
A Finnish mother remembered being a teenager when she and a friend were speaking Swedish on a train. Two adults left the carriage after hearing them, saying they did not want to sit near Swedish speakers. She only recognised the incident as discrimination much later. She also felt that this kind of public hostility had become less common. As in Wales, her children had not experienced the same kind of prejudice.
The incidents happened in different countries and involved different languages but the pattern was similar. In both Wales and Finland, older generations remembered more overt hostility. Younger people, meanwhile, appeared to be growing up with greater acceptance of the minority language.
This suggests that official recognition and greater visibility can change the status of a language without necessarily eliminating the social attitudes that surround it.
Read more:
What happens to pupils’ Welsh after they leave school?
Attitudes towards a language can influence whether families continue to pass it from one generation to the next. For minority languages, this is important because the process of parents passing a language on to their children is one of the main ways a language survives.
Positive attitudes alone are not enough. People also need opportunities to use the language in everyday life, and they need to feel that doing so is accepted. Children today are more likely to encounter Welsh in schools, public services, the media and cultural life. They may also see Welsh-speaking adults and peers using the language outside the home.
Research with children in Wales has found that those educated through the medium of Welsh tend to have more favourable attitudes towards the language than their English-medium peers. Exposure to Welsh-speaking people and communities can also help to build positive attitudes.
But there is still relatively little research into how Welsh speakers and non-Welsh speakers, perceive the language and its speakers.
What has changed?
Most of the Welsh-speaking parents in my research agreed things have changed. The kind of open hostility some experienced when they were young appears to be less common. Their children are growing up with greater opportunities to learn and use Welsh, and with more social and institutional support for doing so. But Patsy’s experience in that Cardiff cafe shows that greater visibility and official support do not automatically make prejudice disappear.
The challenge for Welsh is therefore no longer simply to establish whether the language belongs in public life. It is to ensure that people feel able to use it there without being made to feel rude, difficult or out of place.
That means continuing to create opportunities to hear and use Welsh. But the experiences of Welsh speakers, and the similar stories from Finland, suggest that changing the status of a language is only part of the process. Changing the attitudes surrounding it can take much longer.
Kaisa Pankakoski receives funding from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) for her postdoctoral fellowship.